52 Loaves (16 page)

Now, consider this for a second. Imagine you’re a baker in a large bakery, maybe even a production bakery. And granted, you’re slashing hundreds of loaves, quickly, rushing to load them into the oven, just as I always find myself doing, even with a single loaf. You suddenly realize that your
lame
is missing its blade. Do you stop and look for it, to determine whether it’s on the floor or in a baguette, or do you yell, “Merde!” then pop on a fresh blade and just keep going?

Apparently, French
boulangers
have been doing the latter. Well, I wasn’t going back to that ten-dollar
lame
with its non-replaceable blade for anything (presumably they’re considerably cheaper in bulk, in France), but I’d make damned sure my metal ruler still had a blade attached when I was done.

I was determined to slash like Scaramouche today, having been inspired at the kneading conference in Maine, where I’d seen what a
lame
in the right hands could do. The very same professional baker who’d embarrassed me with his cutting remarks about my kneading did have a redeeming quality: he was an artist, I mean a veritable Rembrandt, with a razor, a regular Sweeney Todd. In less time than it takes me to make a simple crosshatch on my loaf, he’d scored a butterfly into his
boule.
And I don’t mean merely scratched into the surface. This butterfly opened up in bas-relief as the loaf baked! This is even more difficult than it sounds, for not only do the cuts in the wet dough have to be done in the right shape, but they have to be made at a consistent depth and at the correct angle. This was something I was having
difficulty doing even with my simple crosshatch. The lopsided loaf I’d baked for Charlie van Over was a fairly typical case.

Still, my makeshift
lame
was working far better than the single-edged razors I’d also tried for a while. One thing I’d learned from Lindsay at Bobolink’s bakery is that you have to slash almost with abandon, that is, with confidence and without hesitation, and on an angle, not perpendicular to the loaf. A slow, careful cut will invariably catch and drag in the dough, while a quick, bold slash will slice through cleanly.

Slash with confidence and abandon. As the Katha Upanishad exhorts, “Arise! Awake! Approach the great and learn. The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to salvation is hard.”
*

And not about to get any easier.

You shall find out how salt is the taste of another man’s bread, and how hard is the way up and down another man’s stairs.
—Dante

One bite, and I desperately wanted to spit it out. Fortunately it wasn’t my bread. Unfortunately we were in a fancy restaurant
known for this very bread, according to the review we’d read, so I couldn’t just cough it up or pocket it in my napkin.

The bread, baked on the premises, was flat, tasteless, and heavy. This was, in fact, some of the worst bread I had ever eaten. I looked around at my fellow diners to see if anyone else was pointing to it and gesticulating like me. Clearly the baker had screwed up tonight.

“I think he forgot the salt. I should let someone know, shouldn’t I?”

“You absolutely should not!” Anne pleaded. “Why would you want to do that?”

“If I were the baker, I’d want to know my bread was terrible.”

But to my utter astonishment, we seemed to be the only ones in the packed restaurant who felt that way. Everyone else was enjoying the stuff, tearing off chucks and dunking them in olive oil. The only way I could eat the doughy, tasteless stuffwas to add salt and pepper to the olive oil before dipping.

I was
sooo
glad I listened to Anne and kept my mouth shut. As we left the restaurant, we stopped to read a framed magazine article hanging near the doorway, and the mystery was solved. The inedible bread the restaurant is known for is their faithful reproduction of the traditional salt-free Tuscan bread,
pane Toscano
. According to legend, the recipe evolved centuries ago during a dispute over a salt tax, when the locals simply refused to buy salt rather than pay the tax. Although the bread was born of necessity, the Tuscans, who are famed for their gastronomic prowess (and whose restaurants are spreading through America faster than Fascism spread through Italy), inexplicably developed a taste for it; thus the bread continues to be popular there to this day. With all due respect, my advice to Tuscany is, get over it. The evil salt-taxing king is long dead, and a few grams of salt would do wonders for your tasteless bread. With tourists flocking to
Tuscany—the new Provence—you really don’t want their first taste of your region to be flavorless bread.

Salt. If Tuscany is the new Provence, then salt is the new olive oil, providing ample opportunity to spend major sums of money on something to which your mother never gave a second thought. “Blooming in summer, it develops a pink tinge and an aroma of violets.” This has to be a critic’s description of a bottle of wine, right? Wrong. Try French sea salt (fift een dollars for ten ounces) from a mail-order catalog. Salt elitism first became trendy in a few high-end restaurants, then quickly caught on among foodies, leading some home chefs to discard their Diamond Crystal for twenty-dollar-a-pound
fleur de sel
from Brittany. Well, Thomas Keller and Jean-Georges wouldn’t be caught dead using the same salt in their kitchens as you use in yours, so they had to up the ante, turning to such exotics as African clay salt and black lava salt from Hawaii. David Pasternack, the chef at the highly regarded Manhattan seafood restaurant Esca, keeps
several
types of sea salt on hand, matching the salt to the fish.

Whatever. In my bread, I simply use the coarse kosher salt I keep for my everyday cooking. I don’t even have conventional table salt in the house, by the way. After you get used to coarse kosher salt, the traditional fine stuff becomes quite unappealing, a weak, chemical imitation of the real thing, as Cool Whip is to whipped cream. Now, have I done a blind taste test? No. Am I then as guilty of salt snobbery as David Pasternack? It’s all about scale, I say. I just like using coarse kosher salt. Whatever it is the rabbi has done for it works for me.

Salt was very much on my mind as I chewed joylessly on my
pane Toscano
because I had just started following a recommendation from my latest bread book to withhold salt until the very end of kneading. Salt, the author said, interferes with gluten development. Frankly I couldn’t say I had noticed any difference,
but I continued holding the salt back anyway, out of equal parts superstition and reluctance to ignore a renowned baker, but also just in case it really was a critical step—one whose benefit was being masked by the other mistakes I was making.

It certainly isn’t making the bread any worse, I figured, so what’s the harm?

“This is really good bread,” Katie said as she buttered up another slice. “But the loaf seems smaller.”

“That’s because I didn’t measure anything.”

Her eyes grew wide. “Why?”

Because for the past week, during my commute I’d been listening to a recording of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Main-tenanc
e—at least trying to listen to it. It wasn’t going well. I
hadn’t read the book back when it was originally published; I was too cynical, too closed-minded to want to read such nonsense. The fastest way to get me out of a room back then was to say “Zen.” (Saying “motorcycle” was a close second.) Now, thirty-some years later, my mind was open to the concepts expressed in the book (okay, more open, at least), and I popped in the CD with anticipation, only to find that the book had grown as stale as last week’s bread.

Today the prose of
ZMM,
as fans call it, sounds (to my ear, at least) stilted, pedantic, and preachy. Maybe it always sounded that way. I wouldn’t know, but it seemed now as if there never really was a good time for reading this book. When the book was ready, I was too young; when I was ready, the book had aged. Still, it seemed important, so I was determined to finish it, until, about a week into it, I realized with genuine horror that I was starting to write—even think out loud—in Pirsig’s preachy prose. Somewhat shaken, and praying that my own voice would return, I slammed the lid on the CD case and returned it to the library. Maybe I’ll read the
ZMM
Cliff’s Notes—the quick path to enlightenment.

I’d heard enough
ZMM,
however, to understand that in Pirsig’s way of looking at the world, the perfect loaf was not something I was going to create; it was something that I was going to
find.
It was already there, waiting to be discovered or baked, but I had to elevate myself to reach it. It would not reveal itself until I was ready.

I’d been coming around to this way of thinking of late, which is perhaps subconsciously what led me to this decades-old book, a book about another journey. Although the writing didn’t impress me, I was struck by the relevance of its themes—the divide (bridgeable, in his view) between spirituality and technology, the
attempt to define quality—to my own culinary undertaking. Is bread making art or science? Must we scorn technology and resort to wood-fired brick ovens and stone-ground flour in order to achieve truth in bread? Or could technology help me find the perfect loaf? And what, indeed, constitutes perfection? In any event, the book had inspired me to create a loaf of bread by feel, without measuring, trusting my instincts and whatever skills I’d developed over twenty-seven weeks.

I didn’t know how to explain all of this to Katie over dinner, so I just mumbled something about wanting to get closer to the bread.

“But Dad, what if this had been the perfect loaf?” Implying, of course, that it wasn’t. I let her continue. “You didn’t measure. How would you ever make it again?”

Good question. How would Buddha respond? Perhaps with “I wouldn’t have to.”

Except that wasn’t true. Reproducibility—consistency—was one of my primary goals. I needed another answer. But what? I suppose a true master might answer in that annoying Buddhist way by asking another question, and I considered, “How does the salmon find his spawning ground?” Not bad, but not wanting to mix foods, I instead replied to Katie, not in the manner of Buddha, but in the manner of the old Asian handyman in
The Karate Kid:
“Ah, my little seagull, you have so much to learn.”

But not as much as I, for not only did I cheat (I’ll explain in a moment), but my Zen experiment had nearly landed me with a loaf of pure
white
bread. Working without a recipe seemed wonderfully liberating until, as I started to leave the kitchen after kneading the dough, I realized that I’d forgotten to add the whole wheat and rye flours.

Zen dilemma. There was still time to adjust the bread, but . . . should I? I sat down and had a Platonic dialogue with myself in the kitchen. Possibly the whole-grain-flour omission was a sign that the bread was meant to be as white as I. On the other hand, it might merely be yet another indication that I was becoming an increasingly forgetful, middle-aged man who shouldn’t be baking without a recipe. Now, the point of the experiment was to get closer to the art of bread making. But must one be totally spontaneous in order to be in touch with the bread? You don’t go to the supermarket without a grocery list, merely picking items off the shelf that appeal at that moment in time. If you did that, you’d never have mayonnaise in the house.

While I was having this fascinating discourse, the gluten was setting up, so when I finally decided that, Zen or no Zen, I simply didn’t
like
pure white bread, I had my hands full. It took several strenuous minutes of folding and twisting, but the whole wheat and rye flours eventually blended into a homogenous mix. More or less.

The most revealing part of this exercise was the discovery that making decent bread in this manner wasn’t all that difficult.
Letting go was.
Even in the very first step, when I was ready to add water to a handful of flour to make the
poolish.
I knew I wouldn’t have enough
control
(what a loaded word—no wonder I’m a Zen flunk-out) if I simply put the bowl under the running tap, so I looked for something to put the water into first—and instinctively grabbed a measuring cup.

Whoops. That clearly wouldn’t do. I used a tall drinking glass instead, but I found myself thinking, It’s about twelve ounces. Not fair. The clock was an even bigger problem. As much as I tried to ignore it, I couldn’t. Anne and I went for a walk during the proofing, but I was distracted and not “in the moment” because
I feared the yeast would be exhausted before we returned, as the bread had been rising for over two hours. I knew that because I’d sneaked a look at the clock when I set the dough aside to proof.

None of this should’ve been surprising to me. After all, I’m someone who weighs the water for coffee every morning—to the nearest gram. Need I say more? Zen Buddhism is about being in the here and now. For me, though, the clock on the kitchen wall was the whisperer in the concert, that tiny irritation that becomes so colossal it can drown out a symphony, taking you totally out of the experience. Just knowing it was something to avoid changed the experience from being about oneness with the dough to a test of self-control:
Don’t peek!

Yet by another measure, this exercise was a success. I had, after all, made bread without a recipe, by feel. And the bread?

“I think it’s better than usual,” Katie offered.

Certainly it was tasty, perhaps because of the longer rises, but I noted out loud that the crumb was the usual disappointment, soft and spongy as angel food cake, without any large air holes.